New habits

As I watched ants crawl out of my cereal this morning, I realized that part of adjusting to life here in PNG is making a lot of new habits. In some ways, it feels a bit like the first few weeks of adjusting to married life. Things that are “normal” for you, aren’t “normal” anymore, and your environment may be different, you may have to change the way you do things.

Some of the habits I’m having to develop while adjusting to PNG are:

-checking my toothbrush for ants before putting it in my mouth

-checking the dishes for geckos (or gecko “deposits”) before putting them away in the cupboards

-rinsing or flicking ants off dishes before setting the table (forgot to do that this morning, hence the ants crawling out of my cereal)

-scrubbing my feet vigorously every night before bed (my feet get 100x more dirty here than they ever did in the States)

-separating the trash into “burnable”, “non-burnable”, and “compost” buckets every day

-carrying a sweat towel. When you’re dripping sweat constantly, you run out of dry spots on your shirt sleeves/hem pretty quickly! 🙂

-putting our water through a British Berkefeld filter before drinking it (not as necessary here on the center, since our water comes from a well, but a good habit to get into anyway since we’ll need to filter it out in the tribe)

-drinking water a LOT. And then drinking some more. And drinking more.

Just thought you’d enjoy a little glimpse into some of our daily life here. 🙂